50 Signs of Hope for Culture in 2016

Everything is terrible. Or, at least, sometimes it feels that way — the presidential election has long since devolved into a bleakly comic farce, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the planet’s temperature continues its slow, inexorable rise. But! In amongst the gloom, there are signs of hope, and happily, many of them come from the world of culture. From highbrow to lowbrow, from literature to TV and music to video games, here are 50 cultural phenomena that give us hope that somehow, maybe, everything’s gonna be OK. — Tom Hawking, Deputy Editor